Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast: October 2010

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Driving Tours in Virginia

Driving tours in Virginia can be made with most any context you choose – the Civil War, birds and other wildlife, shopping and a half dozen wine trails, to mention but a few.

Virginia’s heritage trails lead groups to the birthplace of country music, through wine country, and to the best places to shop or view birdlife. Explore Civil War battlefields, Colonial and Civil Rights history with informative guides and sites that accommodate groups large and small.

The new Wilderness Road, Virginia’s Heritage Migration Route, traces the footsteps of Daniel Boone and some 300,000 westward pioneers from Winchester, down the Shenandoah Valley and through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky. Groups will fi nd myriad opportunities for shopping, history, dining and lodging along Routes 11 and 58.

Journey Through Hallowed Ground meanders 175 miles from Gettysburg, PA to Charlottesville, VA, a swath of land holding more American history than any other in the nation. From the cradle of democracy, through the tragedy of Civil War, to the struggles of African Americans for freedom and equality, sites on the trail highlight three centuries of poignant events.

The Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail driving tour links eight classic mountain music venues, from the Floyd Country Store to the new state-of-the-art Dr. Ralph Stanley Museum in Clintwood. From Galax to Bristol, birthplace of country music, the Crooked Road leads straight to the heart of Virginia’s mountain music country .(The Crooked Road begins one block behind The Claiborne House B&B right here in Rocky Mount VA!)

Virginia’s statewide network of Birding and Wildlife Trails became a national first in 2005. Colorful, detailed guides to Coastal, Piedmont and Mountain regions aid avid birders who want the best spots for fall migration of waterfowl on the Eastern Shore; unique urban bird watching spots in Richmond; and mountain lookouts to spy birds of prey soaring above the Allegheny Mountains.

One room schoolhouses, churches and historic birthplaces tell the story of the educational struggles African Americans, Native Americans and women engaged in throughout Southern Virginia, on the Civil Rights in Education Heritage Trail. Forty-one sites in all commemorate how minorities charted their educational destinies. The beauty of Southern Virginia, its small towns and long tree-shaded byways, frame this 300-mile self-guided route.

Struggles of another kind are detailed along five inter-connected Civil War Trails in the state that has more significant Civil War sites - 388 to be exact - than any other in the country. Historic markers along Route 11 tell the story of the Shenandoah Valley campaigns that raged from Winchester south to Roanoke. The 1862 Peninsula Campaign includes sites in Newport News that host annual re-enactments. Lee’s Retreat through Southern Virginia is another fascinating trail.

Virginia’s wine trails are clustered by region, from the Chesapeake Bay to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Most routes are easily done in one day or a weekend. Overnight visitors can enjoy the comfort of area hotels or four-season golf-and-spa resorts. Several wineries even offer lodging, like Williamsburg, and group meals, like Barboursville, Prince Michel, and Oasis.

The Jamestown Discovery Trail follows the Route 5 Scenic Byway, taking in all the grandeur of seven James River Plantations. Travel from 1607 at Historic Jamestowne, through the Civil War and the end of slavery.

Cycle through history with Virginia’s Official State Bicycling Map. Routes include the George Washington Memorial Parkway, Northern Virginia’s W & OD Trail, the Virginia Creeper Trail, and the Heart of Appalachia Bike Route, 128 miles through the remote southwest mountain region.

For up-close brushes with nature, try the 8.5-mile Dismal Swamp Canal Trail in Chesapeake or the 57-mile New River Trail State Park, a rail trail that is Virginia’s only linear state park.

See the History and Heritage Itineraries

Multi-Day
Single Day

VIRGINIA IS FOR ROAD TRIP LOVERS

Shellie your innkeeper @ The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast in Rocky Mount, VA - Blue Ridge Country! You can book your room online at any time right here, and save $10 per night. Stay three nights midweek and save $75!

The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast is 15 miles to three exits off The Blue Ridge Parkway.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts!

Telling ghost stories around a campfire is so much fun and of course who can forget the s'mores.

Your innkeeper decided to address the issue of ghosts at The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast in this blog, as I have never done so before, I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts!

("Good Even-ning!" Entry to The Claiborne House grounds)

For many there is romance to be found in ghost stories, especially the story of the broken hearted lover who died before his time was due and is forever roaming the halls of an old house. Or the wife still looking off to sea forever waiting for her husband the sea-captain to return safely. Unfortunately, we have no ghosts here. Don't believe me? Come and find out for yourself, I will make it a challenge if you will.

I have heard many stories from the history of this circa 1895 Queen Anne Victorian. From its days as a private home to a doctor's office. Where the old red barn stood out the back to the coal lane which delivered coal to our house and The Robinson's next door. But to set y'all at ease, we have simply have no ghosts. I know I know, that is a crazy thing to say, after all so many B&B's use a ghost story to draw in guests, it's called marketing and publicity! You know the routine as ghosts are so dang predictable: heavy footsteps in the night, chains rattling, doors slamming. To that I always reply "But I thought ghosts were suppose to float? To go right through walls and such?"

Well you get the picture. To confirm this if you do believe in ghosts, we had a guest stay with us who is a paranormal broker and she confirmed the lack of spirits at The Claiborne House. She said our house was totally at peace and there was no unfinished business here.

Now if you are into these sorta things, we do have a Tour in town put on by the Franklin County Historical Society, it is a ghost tour. They will take you all around town and show you some famous sights, one of which is the Historic High Street Cemetery directly behind us where actors portray famous residents. This cemetery holds the remains of some interesting pieces of Virginia history. We have had guests very interested in the old stones there, and some even search for the original owners of this house. (I will give you a hint, they are found under "A" for Angle in the Angle Family section).

www.franklincountyvirginiahistoricalsoc.org/

www.visitfranklincountyva.org/

VIRGINIA IS FOR HISTORIC HOME LOVERS
Life is too short for bad coffee... Shellie @ The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast in Rocky Mount Virginia http://www.claibornehouse.net

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Our leaves are crying out for attention!

Here are our leaves today at The Claiborne House B&B - crying out for attention!

Too many guests have passed them by...rolled across the porch with their luggage and not spent a moment to sit and innjoy this beauty of Creation! We have rockers and white wicker for you to kick back and absorb the balmy gentle southern breeze as the leaves make their earthbound descent.

We have the room that overlooks the sugar maple which is currently brilliant orange and overlooks the town and valley in the distance AVAILABLE ALL WEEK! Book this room - hurry, FALL WAITS FOR NO MAN! Book here online and save $10. Select The Blue Ridge Room.

(Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast Leaves on October 26, 2010)

I try to tell everyone - peak leaf season is end of October and early November here in the shadow of The Blue Ridge, the eastern foothills. See our website for things to see and do nearby.

(A pile of needy leaves out on the flagstones in front of The Claiborne House B&B)

(By request only...meet Shellie your innkeeper - She usually takes the photos, not in them)

VIRGINIA IS FOR LEAF LOVERS Y'ALL

Monday, October 25, 2010

Claiborne House issued a Certificate Of Excellence Award by Trip Advisor!

THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR GUESTS! We appreciate your ongoing support, thank you for your reviews on the various online review sites. We really do have the greatest guests!
We were awarded a Certificate of Excellence from Trip Advisor. We will proudly display this in the foyer for our guests to see.

See a sampling of our reviews below - feel free to write us a review to help us stay booked! We cherish all of our guests here at The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast - YOU ROCK!

45 reviews of Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast in Rocky Mount

Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast rated "excellent" by 40 travelers

VIRGINIA IS FOR TRAVEL LOVERS

The Long Long Art of Letter Writing

Did you miss me?

THE LONG LOST ART OF LETTER WRITING

Do you have letters stored in a shoebox in your attic? I bet your grandparents did.

With email, instant messaging, texting, and cell phones have you ever wondered in our busy society if we are allowed to miss each other anymore?

I go to our mailbox daily and bring in the bills and junk mail and occasional returned key from a guest who inadvertently kept it in their pocket at check out. I open up the mail box and pull out the junk. There is no joy there anymore, there are no “I miss you” cards, photos of loved ones, graduation announcements, very rarely even a thank you card.

(Friends of our family - lovely mom is expecting first child, dad is now deployed)

Allow me to reminisce for a moment. Guests, a retired Commander of War Ships and Vietnam Vet staying with us went to the National D-Day Memorial in nearby Bedford Virginia today. It is in Bedford due to this small southern town losing more boys per capita in D-Day than any other. The movie “Saving Private Ryan” was based on a book about Bedford and D-Day called “The Bedford Boys” I highly recommend this book.

Back to the whole lost art of letter writing scenario…Have you had a loved one overseas in the service? In a war, in deployment? Do you recall the ultimate lift in your spirit when you opened the mail box and saw that air mail/par avian letter sitting there? Just seeing their handwriting on the envelope put butterflies in your stomach and an ear-to-ear grin across your face.

Tony (your outside innkeeper) was in the Royal Australian Navy for 10 years. Shortly after we first were married in 1989 in Australia, he was sent off to the first Gulf Conflict. His ship HMAS Adelaide was the first to fire enemy fire in the gulf. HMAS ADELAIDE an FFG had come back to Sydney after a 2 month deployment, and I heard it on the news that his ship would refuel, restock and turn right around and head to the Gulf of Oman. I was heartbroken.

(Tony's Ship now decommissioned - HMAS ADELAIDE more on it here)

Now all of this was pre-cell phones, pre-personal computers, we owned a type writer and pen and paper, there was no way contact each other except via the regular old mail. The ship used to receive mail once a fortnight and if the sailors had a letter ready and got it out there in time it would be taken via helicopter, processed and sent our way. So when the mail eventually reached my letter box it would contain letters for the entire month, if you have a husband like Tony, that meant three or four. Your heart would race, yours hands would shake as you carefully carried them to the nearest stoop to open and absorb every word, every dot on an “i” and every cross on a “t”, then run inside for a Kleenex!

If that was you, then you would agree that you not only held the letters in your hand until the ink wore off, you also smelled the letters hoping to get a far away whiff of your loved ones. Yeah it sounds silly, but it is true!

I beseech you today, write a letter to someone you love, if nothing else, write those three little words we all long to hear “I LOVE YOU” and sign your name.

VIRGINIA IS FOR LETTER WRITING LOVERS

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Midweek EXTRA SPECIAL Continued thanks to Junie

"Take Three and Butter 'em While They're Hot!"

Junie here at The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast, I have convinced Mum and Dad into continuing the:

“Take Three and Butter ‘Em While They’re Hot Special to save you $75!”

Celebrate the 75^th Anniversary of The Blue Ridge Parkway with us and take advantage of this special discount! You will innjoy the same home-cooked delicious breakfasts and fine coffee on the porch. Innjoy Blue Ridge Country Virginia for less during the week and SAVE. You just have gotta get out here – the leaves will be brilliant til the first week or so of November.

Cheers, Junie B Jones, Your Assistant Innkeeper at The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast

Check Availability and Make Reservations Here
View Our Website Here
Learn more about this special here
Don't forget our Sites of Interest Page and Music Events Page to see what events are coming up!
More about The Blue Ridge Parkway 75th Here - She's more than a road!

VIRGINIA IS FOR B&B LOVERS

The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast is 15 miles to three exits off The Blue Ridge Parkway. Did you know The Blue Ridge Parkway has more variety of leafy trees than anywhere else?

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Allow me to get your goat!

A LOCAL BILLBOARD THAT'S BOUND TO GRAB YOUR ATTENTION!

I keep forgetting to mention to our guests the local goats who came to celebrity status by appearing UP ON this iHop billboard on highway 220 heading into Roanoke!

Last week we came back from Kirk Avenue Music Hall in downtown Roanoke and looked back as we drove southbound on HWY 220 to see one of the goats eating the sign! Apparently iHop loves the advertising, as it is just a couple miles down the road past this sign!

Watch a video here - but let your innkeeper warn you, it is the BEST is to see them at night as they stand as figurines uplighted against the sign! We typically see four of them up there standing in front of the lights.

Oh and by the way, these goats have their own FACEBOOK PAGE and have as I type this have 1,255 fans. You can visit their Facebook page by clicking here.

I ask you, isn't this good news? I mean stuff politics at the moment, aren't ya'll sick of the news and hearing bad news beat into your brain from all news sources? This is just simple, clean fun.

Send it on to someone else or retweet on twitter and get someone else's goat!

VIRGINIA IS FOR BREAKFAST LOVERS

Book your room online from our website here. Don't forget our colors peak at the end of October early November! You still have time to get on out here!

Sweet Sounds Along The Crooked Road

Crooked Road, Sweet Music

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2010 TIM THORNTON

Musicians such as David Davis and the Warrior River Boys – performing here at a Ralph Stanley Festival – keep mountain music alive along the Crooked Road.

For about 200 miles of Virginia roadway, at about 23 different stops, the idea is the same: Take part, one way or another, in the music of these old blue mountains.

It was past seven on a Tuesday evening. The streets of Galax, Va. weren’t quite deserted, but they didn’t miss it by much. The man and woman started toward me from across Main Street, almost a block away. I had barely pulled the black case that held my guitar out of the car when they walked right up to me. The man took a step closer.

“Where’s the jam?” he said.

Like every Tuesday, the jam was down at the Stringbean Coffee Shop. And, as that perceptive stranger guessed, that was where I was headed. Things had already begun when my beat-up Martin and I pulled up a chair way down at the far end of the sort-of-circle from the folks who seemed to be calling the tunes. I’d been to the Stringbean jam once before, but that was a couple of years earlier and that time I’d come without an instrument. The bass player, whom I’d met years before when we were both reporting on some kind of political gathering at Mount Rogers School, wanted a break. So I stepped in and thumped along for a while. But the bass player wasn’t there this night. I didn’t know any of the 11 other folks up there on the Stringbean’s little stage.

There’s at least one jam just about every night of the week on The Crooked Road – plus Sunday afternoons inFloyd and Thursday mornings at a Rocky Mount Dairy Queen. The Crooked Road was conceived as a tourism and economic development tool, but it’s also a genuine attempt to preserve Appalachian culture, primarily through that culture’s music.

While some people might think of it as hillbilly music, the strumming and plunking and sawing that comes out of the mountains is really a multicultural stew. Old ballads and fiddle tunes from Ireland, Scotland and England ran into Africa’s banjo and a new kind of music was born. Over time, the band grew. Guitars joined with the post-Civil War industrial revolution. Mandolins came from Italian immigrant coal miners. Dulcimers came from Sweden or Germany, or were invented right here, depending on who you listen to. Autoharps generally came from Sears & Roebuck.

It’s more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

The Crooked Road is also an actual road (several really, but mostly U.S. 58), that meanders for more than 200 miles through 10 counties between Rocky Mount and Breaks Interstate Park on the Virginia-Kentucky border. The music it celebrates exploded into the consciousness of people who live outside these mountains in 1927 with the Bristol sessions – 12 days of recording that Johnny Cash called the Big Bang of Country Music.

Some stops along The Crooked Road, such as the Carter Family Fold in Hiltons and The Birthplace of Country Music Alliance in Bristol, commemorate those old times. Some, such as the Ralph Stanley Museum, pay tribute to stars who are still performing. Some, such as Ferrum College’s Blue Ridge Institute, bring an academic cast to the preservation of traditional mountain music. But nearly every stop along The Crooked Road is a place to hear traditional mountain music – and maybe dance to it.

Readers of The Washington Post, USA Today and The Houston Chronicle are among the people who know about the playing and dancing that goes on every Friday at The Floyd Country Store. Stay home and you can hear regional bands on Blue Ridge Backroads, the show broadcast from Galax’s Rex Theater. Veer off The Crooked Road proper and drop by the Blue Ridge Music Center at milepost 213 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. In addition to exhibits that’ll teach you something about the music, somebody’s playing there every day. And if you need to learn how to dance to this kind of music, teaching that is one of the things they do down at the Country Cabin near Norton.

We don’t have time to talk about all the festivals and hiking and canoeing and history along The Crooked Road. But there are 23 little kiosks along the way where you can stop and tune your radio to the appropriate channel and learn about Pop Stoneman’s 23 children – “Momma and Daddy liked each other a lot,” their daughter Roni Stoneman likes to say. You can hear about Pop’s big hit with a song about the Titanic and how that led to the Victor Talking Machine Company sending Ralph Peer down from New York for the Bristol sessions. You can hear about the connections among old-time and blues and country and bluegrass. And you can hear the music.

If you want to, you can do more than just hear it. Old-time mountain music was never really meant to be performed for an audience. It’s always been more about participation. A person can participate by dancing or clapping or singing along – or by picking up an instrument and joining in.

That’s why I was sitting in the Stringbean between Richard Smith, who I’m pretty sure has been fiddling longer than I’ve been alive, and Brandon Nester, who’s not old enough to drive. Nester built the banjo he was playing. I was just trying to keep up.

Each jam has its own rules and culture. Some are well-regulated, with a leader calling out tunes. Some are musical circles, with each person calling out a song in turn. Some mix those styles, with the leader occasionally pointing to someone and asking him or her to play or sing something. At the Stringbean, the head fiddler would say something to the banjo player on his right, the guitar player on the fiddler’s left would hear it and off they’d go. The rest of us had to figure out what was being played and jump in whenever we thought we’d found a handle. We rolled through “Sally Ann” and “Soldier’s Joy” and “Kitty Clyde” and “Sweet Marie” and a few I didn’t know and couldn’t catch the names of. But there I was, soaking up the old tunes in the old way, seated between an old master and a talented youngster. It was just like the olden days.

Except for that fellow who kept looking down from his banjo mid-song so he could do some texting.

Ferrum College’s Blue Ridge Institute is home to a repository of mountain culture and music, as well as its annual folklife festival.

Article from October 2010 BLUE RIDGE COUNTRY MAGAZINE. We love this magazine as do our guests, we hope you can pick up a copy yourself and fall in love with the Blue Ridge! Click here to see more articles and information from Blue Ridge Country Magazine.

The DQ in this article is just 2 miles from The Claiborne House Bed and Breakfast in Rocky Mount. We can give you directions and have an earlier breakfast here if you want to enjoy your coffee with a few pickers and strummers!

The last image is our Blue Ridge Institute Folklife Festival, it is another occurrence in our area that you will adore! It happens every year on the grounds of our Ferrum College - about 8 miles from The Claiborne House, the third weekend in October. 3 staged of music ALL DAY LONG, great food, coon dog trials, mule jumping, so much to see and do!

VIRGINIA IS FOR FUNKY FOLK LOVERS